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There are a number of new XPath extension functions available to XForms developers in the latest release of IBM Forms, and I'd like to draw your attention to two of them: eval() and eval-in-context(), and they are wicked cool!

The function eval(expr) evaluates expr in the context of the function call and returns the result. The eval-in-context(expr, contextExpr) function does a similar thing, except it first evaluates the contextExpr and uses the result as the context for the main expression. This is desparately needed for XPath 1.0 expressions to eliminate the infestation of pesky ".." operations that typically occurs. I've used it, rather than eval(), in the samples below.

One use of these functions is to enable the powerful capability to let XML data carry sophisticated dynamic metadata, which can then be implemented and enforced with singular XForms bind elements that attach the semantics of the metadata whereever it is found in the data.

It turns out that the xsi:type attribute from XML schema is already a rudimentary version of the metadata idea we're pursuing here, so the question becomes what if you could do it for all of the juicy metadata that XForms contains, like calculated data values, data validity constraints, and so forth? Let's look at what this "decorated" data might look like for a simple expense report:

It is really easy to use XPath capabilities to find all elements having a value attribute and then to bind an XForms calculate formula to those elements, and then eval-in-context() is used to determine the result according to whatever expression is given in the data, like this:

The nodeset expression starts with descendant::* to explore all elements of the data, and then the predicate [@value] selects all elements that have a value attribute. For each such element node, a calculate formula is bound to it by the XForms bind. The eval-in-context() call uses ".." to go up a level so that the formulas in the value attributes can omit "../", e.g. so the expression can simply be "quantity * price" rather than "../quantity * ../price".

On the expense report data above, this binding evaluates the constraint expression attached to the total element, and then converts the result to a boolean. Due to the constraint, the expense form data cannot be submitted to a server for processing unless the total expense is less than 10000.

In other scenarios, you may want to control the other metadata properties like relevant, required and readonly. Here's an example of data where relevance and requiredness control is needed:

The xsi:type assignment for age already works in XForms without needing a bind. The required setting for name is statically true, not dynamically changeable, so it is very handy to be able to allow either a static boolean value or an expression, like this:

Technically, the required property on the parent element is conditional on the age value, but that is an automatic feature of XForms, i.e. nodes marked required are only required if they are relevant. It should not be too surprising to see that the bind for relevance looks like this: